It’s really hard for me not to be skeptical of a study that starts with the premise of measuring everyone else against “the most privileged group,” aka. white men, and then calling their metric “health justice.”
I don’t know the stats off the top of my head but I’ve heard many times that men’s health issues are under-studies relative to women’s — ie breast cancer versus prostate cancer. I’ve also seen that mental health problems affect men more than women, as well as behavioral problems with youth, and yet there’s no outcry for “health justice” for all the men with mental issues or men vastly overrepresented in the prison population.
The study claims that health correlates most strongly with income, and that the gap between black and white has narrowed - and yet the study author claims there’s a “stunning lack of progress.”
Most of America’s problems correlate most strongly with income and more weakly with race and gender, which isn’t surprising when income itself is uneven between race and gender demographics.
Yet it feels to me like we’re constantly crying out about race and gender discrimination while paying much less attention to wealth and income which seem to be the root issue.
Are there racists in the country? Do hate crimes happen? Yes, and we shouldn’t gloss over them.
But are the country’s problems driven mostly by racial hatred? I don’t think so. I think the problem is we have done a lot to pull the ladder up behind the upper-middle class, everyone in the lower income brackets is getting screwed, and that disproportionately affects minorities and historically disadvantaged groups. I think if we could get more serious about putting the ladder back and investing in upward mobility for all, we could make a lot more progress on all the rest of the issues that are affecting the country.
"I don’t know the stats off the top of my head but I’ve heard many times that men’s health issues are under-studies relative to women’s — ie breast cancer versus prostate cancer."
I think the actual metric is extremely complicated. By and large, symptoms of diseases and illness are based on male patients. Drug trials often exclude women (due to pregnancy risk) and many exclude pregnant women (forcing pregnant women to go without necessary medication to protect the fetus). Certain women's cancers like breast cancer recieve significant income but other issues like endomeitrosis recieve little to no research. Women are statistically forced to wait longer at ER and have their pain dismissed more regularly as not indicating anything serious.
So in some ways men are considered 'default' for drug trials, clinical health profiles, their pain and health are considered more seriously, etc. On the other hand, there isn't a lot of money for mental health geared towards men in particular, certain cancers that are male specific are ignored, and there isn't as much pressure for thinness and health on men as there are women socially.
So I don't think there's clear lines that by far X gender is oppressed on all levels in the healthcare field. It would be more accurate to presume that there are many different systemic failures correlated with different demographics, and this affects different demographics differently.
While I agree with you that class has a massive influence, I would hesitate to agree with you that the country's problems should be considered primarily class based. We are still only a generation past (less than a generation? arguably still ongoing?) purposefully refusing to lend or perform economic deals with people based on their race or gender. This would show up as class stratification but has a racial/sexist cause, so it may be inaccurate to presume that solely economic solution would resolve all other societal stratification issues.
(But I really do agree with you we need to remove barriers of economic class transfer.)
Statistically speaking, white men are far and away the highest income earners in America. They are literally the most privileged group. Until 2008, 44 of 44 of US presidents were white men. White men dominate the Fortune 500, Wall Street, and leadership in the government.
The paper also explicitly defined health justice as "a measure of the correlation of health outcomes with income, race/ethnicity and sex; and a summary health equity metric.", which doesn't sound like much of an editorialization to me.
Who do you think is more privileged, with "privileged" meaning access to money, support, opportunities and potential for advancement: Will Smith's kids or a white poor guy who grew up in West Virginia?
I think the point the parent is trying to make is that at any individual's level income and wealth are a far better measure of privilege than race. Yes, wealth is highly correlated with race in the US, and a lot of that has to do with legally enforced racist policies in our past. And there are also certainly some examples of privilege that do correlate more with race than income (e.g. racial profiling by law enforcement). But if your headline is "Gap between rich and poor Americans...", why not just focus on those who are actually rich and those who are actually poor.
> Who do you think is more privileged, with "privileged" meaning access to money, support, opportunities and potential for advancement: Will Smith's kids or a white poor guy who grew up in West Virginia?
This is a misunderstanding of privilege.
You don't compare Smith to poor people in West Virginia, you compare him to his Hollywood peers. And there are fewer roles for black men, so yes, he is less privileged than his peers.
For poor white people the situation is more complex but anyone providing services knows that poor white men face significant disadvantages across a range of indicators and they're trying to fix it.
Yes, there are white people are poorer than Will Smith. Unfortunately, if we want to do analysis of society at large, we need to look at trends. And leaving race out of class analysis tends to obscure some of the relationships at play. This is because class and our notions of race are forever entangled, not least of all because we are society predicated upon slave labor.
Doesn't the "most privileged group" moniker applied in the quote that parent chose to argue against do exactly what you suggest: focusing on those who are rich without race?
Parent chose to explicitly label the most privileged group as white men before arguing that white men aren't actually the most privileged group, when they are in most conceivable metrics.
I think income and race/gender are too intertwined to characterize it as ignoring the income issue. I agree that income is strongly correlated to many outcomes, health or otherwise. When it comes to solutions, though, you can't raise income without addressing the racial and gender biases today.
The same resume with a Black sounding name gets far less traction than a stereotypically white name. Income and race are, unfortunately, coupled.
I think economic justice and racial equality and gender equality all come hand-in-hand.
When you hear people talking about racial injustice, while you advocate for economic equality, I think both are ultimately advocating for the same position.
There is no such thing as a root cause. The economy is a dynamic system under a legal framework which governs the way it works. A lot of that legal framework is designed to punish the poor and punish minorities which makes them poor. It's doubly troubling and to tackle inequality requires tackling the legal and social framework our economy exists in which happens to have institutional racism and sexism.
In other words, does racism and gender create the income inequality we see across the board? No, but is getting rid of racism and gender inequality required to diminish income inequality? Yes.
You can't get rid of racial and gender inequality, because we're inherently inequal to each other AND between the genders. It's in our DNA for the foreseeable future. We can diminish and mute it, at best. Diminishing returns has set in, while we ignore the more impactful issues.
> men’s health issues are under-studies relative to women’s — ie breast cancer versus prostate cancer.
That sounds unfair, but according to the staistics I can find [0] [1], breast cancer kills more and/or younger people (mostly women) than prostate cancer, which kills slightly less and/or older men (many men die with prostate cancer, but not of it).
My friend, Tiana Baldwin, focused on the statistical correlation between Nursing Home costs and survival metrics. She got an award for her master thesis (and graduated), before becoming the city planner for Anaheim, CA. I would have thought it would be easy to look up. Now she works at Cal State University Fullerton as a Professor under her married name. I'm sure she can point you to the specific study. Sadly, I cannot find it casually.
>It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.
Being healthy is cheap as can be, but the gap is indeed increasing. One need only spend 10 minutes at their favorite discount grocer checkout line to see why.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's very sad. Why are we destroying our bodies?
edit: this quote is getting at it, but seems to ignore the real problem.
> Research shows that health care accounts for only 10% to 20% of overall health outcomes
> when patients living in public housing have problems like pest infestations or lead paint, their team finds them attorneys to hold their landlords to account.
> Such approaches, Moore says, can address social determinants on a local level. But they need to be implemented more widely.
Do we have many people dying from lead and pests nowadays?
To me it seems like we've adopted the uber model for health in the United States. Free market and damn the externalities. Resulting in a nice profit transfer from the working class to Mondelez et al.
It's "cheap" if your labor is valued. I imagine the relationship between health consequences and income could somewhat be related to having multiple jobs, long hours, and being too tired to prioritize health after a long day.
That fast food looks quick, convenient and affordable when you're going from one job to another and don't have much time or the additional money to spend on healthier fast casual eating options.
I do not disagree that whole fruits and vegetables are, by and large, cheap and ubiquitous. If the health outcomes were tied to "cheap and ubiquitous" produce, we'd be off the charts. Yet, here we are.
My point is workers who are barely scraping by are disadvantaged to not have the flexibility that higher-income earners do, to actually have the time/energy to cook a healthy meal. Or pay someone else to do it. They end up opting for meals that don't offer the macronutrient composition they need (e.g., frequently the issue is overconsumption of carbs), and are lacking in micronutrients as well (because there aren't enough fruit/vegetable servings in their diet).
Most poor people eat out with a fraction of the frequency of richer people. Its finding the time and motivation to burn the calories you consume that's the hard part.
And when not eating out, your fastest, most affordable option is processed foods, typically high in carbs and low in micronutrients. It's poor quality food.
Regarding weight: it's more practical to limit calorie consumption than "burn" them through exercise. An hour of high-intensity cardio might only burn 200 calories. Eating less calories is easier. To get some volume, generous portions of fibrous vegetable help-- so your stomach doesn't feel empty.
Yeah, for most people who aren't obsessive calorie counters I really think eating more fibrous vegetables is the best way for them to make a healthy lifestyle change that would allow them to lose weight / maintain a healthy weight. I do it every time I go on a diet/cut. You can feel just as full eating 1lb of broccoli with a moderate amount of butter and salt (about 300kcal) as you do eating an entire bag of chips (about 1500 kcal).
And making the broccoli is almost as convenient: you can get microwaveable bags that you just zap for x amount of time, empty into a bowl with some butter, add salt, mix and enjoy. Two minutes of actual effort, 10 minutes total time.
I think a lot of it has to do with the way we arrange food in stores, profit margins for food producing businesses, availability (you can't usually get frozen broccoli at a gas station), what food gets marketed, etc. Really if you put even a small amount of effort in getting veggies to taste good they taste as good as most junk food and processed food. It may never taste as good as spicy cheese flavored corn chips but is still pretty good
Only 5% of working adults in the US have more than one job. The average worker between 25-54 works 40.5 hours with an average commute of 26 minutes each way.
Unhealthy foods are cheaper than healthy foods, partially due to sugar subsidies. This is what happens when corporations run the government. They lobby for things that are beneficial to their bottom line rather than what's better for the well being of the population.
Processed unhealthy foods are cheaper than processed healthy(er) foods.
Beans and grains are cheap. Staple fruits and vegetables are cheap. Chicken is cheap (especially dark meat). Eggs are cheap. You can feed a family of 4 a very healthy diet for ~$100 a month if you're willing to put in the work sourcing and cooking.
That's the crux of the issue, though. Food deserts combined with a lack of nutritional and culinary knowledge - maybe a lack of time to prepare healthy meals - is what's killing the average American diet, middle class and below.
Side note: if you raise your kids on hot dogs, chicken nuggets and soda every day then you will possibly ruin their palette for life. We now have people that find drinking water disgusting, because all they've ever drank is Diet Coke.
I have a few friends on the poverty line. They all live in houses and apartments without access to a working kitchen. Many rented rooms don't come with kitchen "privileges." In addition they work 60+ hours a week making time consuming food preparation less practical.
The result is a lot of cheap pre-packaged food and fast food.
Cheap, gross pizza is a thing, and you just have to pick it up. IIRC a Costco combination pizza will provide enough calories for a largish adult for two days, and is $10. No oven, no kitchen, no gadgets, no cooking required. It'll even probably still be fine to eat day two without refrigeration. Ditto all sorts of other dirt-cheap gross pizza joints, not just Costco. Math works out almost as good. Or cheap frozen pizza on clearance (talking like Totinos or store brand here, not even anything as fancy as Freschetta) if you got a freezer and an oven.
It's also incredibly unhealthy if you ate it regularly, but hey. Cheap, tasty-enough calories hitting every "food group" from the good ol' pyramid. Though arguably not fruit, I guess.
[EDIT] I'm always confused when folks talk about healthy, fresh food being a slam-dunk price win over bad food. I can only assume they are not familiar with what's actually out there, in the bad food universe, and are just looking at how expensive full-price Frosted Flakes are or whatever. I find it damn hard to compete with $5/day/person like that Costco pizza, without resorting to a bachelor's rice-n-beans-n-whichever-veggies-were-about-to-go-bad diet.
Costco pizza is great, but poor people don't shop at stores that make you pay just to shop there. They don't buy in bulk because even when it would be cheaper in the long run they don't have the money for the investment or the space to store what isn't being used. Often they don't live in areas where a costco is even anywhere near them. Those in food deserts don't even get regular stores. When time is factored in (prep time, clean up and number of shopping trips required) bad food is unquestionably less expensive.
Rice, beans/lentils, basic veggies, eggs, milk, and chicken are all cheaper than the gross pizza you're describing, and much healthier. Throw in some spices, and it'll taste better, too.
Sure, the Costco pizza's just an example because I happened to be contemplating their calorie-including menu while standing in the grocery checkout line the other day. That's expensive junk food and happens to actually have some vitamins in it, hidden amongst the grease and fat and colon cancer. Check out pop tarts for some real WTF junk food cheapness. Neighborhood of 10,000 calories in a box of 48 "pastries" (24 2-packs), depending on the flavor. Around $11 if you don't catch it on sale and buy the real deal instead of an off brand. Zero prep (can optionally heat, don't have to, microwave's about as good as a toaster so equipment's flexible if one or the other's broken or missing) and keeps forever.
I'm not advocating junk food, mind you. I just don't get why people say it's expensive and so poor people must only be saving time with it, at best. Sure, it can be expensive, if you're running around buying name-brand potato chips or something. It can also compete with bargain-hunter, ultra-penny-pinching healthy cooking, though, on a strictly price basis, while conferring other benefits (health not among them). Depends on what you buy.
Incidentally, the canonical junkfood-diet meat to accompany rice and beans is hot dog, not chicken. Easier to cook, comes pre-ruined so you can't accidentally ruin it during cooking, competitive with even very cheap chicken on price, keeps much longer.
Heh I mean I know it can be cheap. I think people just mean that the way many people do it isn't - McDonalds, Coke, chips, etc. But yeah, my freshman year roommate lived off of pop tarts for the whole year, since they were so cheap. He got saving on them down to an art, with coupons and timing bulk buys. He developed a pretty terrible chronic illness at some point later on, probably not related, but I've always wondered.
Good tip on the hotdog, that actually sounds kinda tasty.
Exactly. I have loved ones who have lived without functioning kitchens, refrigerators, cars, home climate control, etc.
Some folks work ludicrous hours per week at multiple jobs. Telling them to put in more effort in shopping, exercise, cooking, and dishes is missing the problem entirely.
Lack of knowledge is one prt, but also convenience plays a big role. Cooking is considered a household chore, and life should be easy. The neighborhood store doesn't offer raw ingredients to cook, and you need weekly planning to stock up on this when you drive to the big store outside of town. You get everything processed and sugared up right around the corner every day.
No government regulation should be imposed on the country as a whole so that some people can find things more convenient. If people can't be bothered to put some effort into being healthy, I'm not sure why I should care if the "gap between rich and poor American's health is widening" or not.
You may have missed other parts of this conversation where people point out how corporate interests have had great success in getting the government to promote and subsidize unhealthy foods (see: corn subsidies, the food pyramid, subpar food labelling, cheap junk food in public schools).
The government (at various levels) should certainly have a role in ensuring a healthy population. But if nothing else, the government (at all levels) should be sure not to promote and fund profoundly unhealthy habits over healthy ones.
> The government (at various levels) should certainly have a role in ensuring a healthy population.
Lifestyle choices are not a function of government even if those choices result in shortened lifespans, poor health, poverty, or other "negative" outcomes. These are not externalities and are no business of society. You might say that sick people cost the society money. But the answer to that is not that people are sick, it's that someone has decided to spend money on those people. Of course this approach doesn't put more power into the hands of control freaks, so it'll constantly be fought.
> But if nothing else, the government (at all levels) should be sure not to promote and fund profoundly unhealthy habits over healthy ones.
Agreed. Government should not feed false information to the people.
> The government (at various levels) should certainly have a role in ensuring a healthy population.
this is an opinion. to the extent that the government publishes nutrition recommendations or information, it should of course be accurate, but I really don't want to see what the government actively "ensuring" my health looks like.
Not allowing toxic chemicals in your food, for example, and establishing monitoring and penalties to accomplish that. Not allowing companies to lie about what's in the food they sell you, as another example.
I'm not aware of any government regulation to enforce convenience. If given a choice, most people will choose instant convenience if they are not aware of the long term effects of this decision.
Hence the lack of education part.
Tastes change with time. Speaking from personal experience, I'm not an extreme of the archetype you think of (always eating chicken nuggets and drinking Coke as a kid), but that was still a large portion of my diet. For some reason, bitter foods are far more palatable to me now, than they were then. Some people find certain green, leafy vegetables, to be bitter, for example. But I love it all now! If you eat enough salads, you kind of get used to eating salad. With enough time, I find myself craving them like I would have wanted McDonald's.
I grew up on a poor diet and eating various (not all) veggies seemed bland. It only took about 2-3 weeks of clean eating (no meat, minimal sugar/salt) to "reset" my palette to where everything natural started tasting delicious.
Yes! During a time when I lived off of about $10k/year in a HCOL (including renting a room in a shared house) I ate plentiful beans, rice, cheap vegetables and chicken. Lots of cheap and healthy options if one is interested.
I hate to be that person, but the statement "grains are not a healthy food" is a pretty bold statement. I'm not sure that the best evidence available supports that claim.
Considering how difficult it is to conduct reliable experiments in human nutrition, and the wide variety of conflicting results, this is a dubious claim. I'm fairly confident that traditional grain-based diets are better for you than a diet based on modern processed/junk foods. Grains do contain anti-nutrients, but it's uncertain if they're a serious health risk, and it's possible to reduce the levels with fermentation (e.g. sourdough).
Whole grains aren't unhealthy as part of a balanced diet. Bread or rice makes vegetables more palatable, adds some protein, carbs, fiber, and minerals. Carbs are vital if you're doing physical labor. Grains are more calorie dense than veggies, cheaper, and store longer, than veggies - all big pluses for low-income households.
Carbs are vital? I've been living for 7 years on a sub-20g net carb diet. I'm relatively active and participate in several century bike rides throughout the year. I don't seem to be missing out?
Actually, carbs are the only macro-nutrient your body can completely do without.
Physical labor usually means long duration but low intensity exercise, which you can do just as well on a fat-based diet. Carbs only improve performance for short duration high intensity exercise (e.g. sprinting/weight lifting).
Absolutely not. Don’t perpetuate this BS. Calorie for calorie and pound for pound healthy foods are far cheaper and more nutritious than whatever crap people are reaching for on supermarket shelves or drive thru windows these days.
People have had their sense of taste hyper-stimulated for so long that they have grown a distaste for most “healthy” foods, to their own detriment. If every bite isn’t orgasmically delicious they are unlikely to eat that food again.
Well, pound for pound, and calories for calories, a pound of vegetables is more expensive than a pound of 85/15 beef. And a 2L of Coke is even cheaper (and heavier and calorific)... So, there’s that as a starting point.
Their are several kinds of sugars. White sugar (Sucrose) is more familiar as a granular sweeter, but industry has no problem working with a cheaper liquid.
According to a Google lookup, unhealthy foods are cheaper at about $1.50 per day. Also if people cut back on quantity consumed it may be adequate despite being unhealthy food. I think most people eat too many calories per day for the amount of physical activity.
A bit pedantic perhaps but let's bear in mind that with the exception of contaminated products, there are no such things as unhealthy foods. There is such a thing as an unhealthy diet constructed from disproportionate and inappropriate amounts (as you point out) of the essential nutrients we need including carbohydrates, fats, protein, vitamins and minerals.
This doesn’t solve the problem of people who die of seizures, diabetes, or other ailments because they can’t afford their medication or insulin. Being lucky is not a healthcare strategy.
There is a caravan of Americans who went to Canada to get affordable insulin [1]. From a “first world country”.
The answer is universal healthcare. Everything else is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
edit: type 2 Diabetes is a preventable condition, please see my parent edit. Even if it wasn't preventable, apparently only 20% of the disparity is due to unequal healthcare.
We don't need better health care. We just need people to care about their health.
to the people commenting that t1 is not preventable.. yes. I know that. I also know that type 2 is 23x more common in the US so it's really a nitpick imo: http://diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics/
Americans who manage to avoid knowing that they have Type 1 diabetes long enough to eventually be misdiagnosed as having Type 2 diabetes are a testament to the failure of America's healthcare. These types of cases should be nonexistent in any country with modern healthcare.
Perhaps it should be pursued. Actually yes, I think it should.
But I think the article is trying to imply that it all has to do with wealth as a cause, not wealth as a substitute identifier for a host of healthy habits.
The healthy habits are not expensive, but mostly rich people seem to adopt them.
This just isn't true for several reasons, but I'll pick one and run with it.
Learning to cook is time-consuming and can be frustrating for some people. The skill of cooking is essential to eating better. You really have to learn to make your own food to maximize your health.
How do you expect someone working a full-time minimum-wage job, driving Uber on the side (because I meet almost nobody in rideshares that don't also do something else), taking care of children to find the time to learn to cook? Do they own all of the equipment that they need to be able to cook?
Put simply, they wouldn't be in a position to have to juggle between such terribly paying work and everything else. Many of them probably see fast food as a solution to work more and earn more since their pay is literally hourly. Can you honestly nnot understand why they might prefer the extra $8?
Also, read up on food deserts, it's a huge problem in America. 25 million people have limited to no access to fresh & healthy options at their grocery store. Your grocery store likely doesn't have that problem.
This still doesn’t address the wild inefficiencies in the US healthcare system causing us to spend more per capita than any other first world country with poorer outcomes.
People should take care of their health, but that is not going to fix US healthcare (such as private insurance, pharma, and healthcare providers gouging healthcare consumers). Stab at the heart of the beast.
> Do we have many people dying from lead and pests nowadays?
You misunderstand the problem.
You "die" from a heavy metal or other accumulating poisons only if you get an acute poisoning with a pretty large amount.
But if you get only tiny amounts for decades you don't die. You just suffer form a lot of "minor" ailments, and most of the time nobody even attributes it to lead (or mercury or whatever). That's because the correlation with aging is almost 1 - after all this can go on for decades with imperceptibly tiny increases in issues, completely in line with aging. Your brain will function less well. Your eyes may be dry and other minor sight issues. Key word "minor", you will not have some big clear symptoms, you will have lots of small issues. A few more warts from decade to decade. A bit more psoriasis. A few cramps. You are more easily tired ("it's the stress"). Maybe some slight depression, occasionally, and you don't get anything done. You get more colds than ten years ago and they last longer. Allergies start and grow.
Check my history, I posted about it, I had chronic (mercury) poisoning diagnosed, and only through luck and persistence. I have a long list of such symptoms that are all gone now even though I'm ten years older now than when I started (chelation) treatment, and which I myself, just like any doctor, always thought were "normal" issues that everybody has. That includes stuff like a nodule disappearing from my thyroid and the thyroid shrinking to normal size, to the great amazement of the endocrinologist, under chelation treatment within less than a year, after it had been there for over two decades. Needless to say, instead of asking questions and following up on how I achieved the miracle - nothing at all. And it wasn't some random miracle that cannot be explained, clearly this had to do with the chelation treatment, since that exact area became very active exactly after the 4th or 5th such treatment. Nobody cares.
Anyway, your post shows one of the problems: If there isn't a big problem visible right away there is none. Heavy metal poisonings with tiny amounts over decades are next to impossible to prove, unless you are "lucky" and for some reason when you are tested you actually have quite a bit moving around in your blood (unusual for such chronic exposure, where most of it is stored in various organs).
So nobody knows - wants to know? - how big the problem really is. My own doctor, researcher at a university clinic, is pretty pessimistic though.
We Americans are living in a pretty stressful time as well (i.e. politically, financially, among other things). I can't name the study(ies) to show it, but psychology has told us that stressful environments correlate with poverty and other awful factors, which also cause even more stress, so people tend to go down and stay down in a vicious cycle, unless they make a significant effort to turn it all around.
(for example, say your job stresses you out so much and takes so much time out of your day that you can't cook, then suppose you feel pressured enough that you settle for fast food, and exercise less. So you gain weight over time. Now your weight might just stress you out too; now you have to deal with the detriments of that, on top of your shitty job. Sounds hard...)
So it makes sense to me that poor Americans's health is getting worse. For rich people, I'd have to assume they have the time/resources (possibly chefs) to get the healthy food and such that they need, so it's not changing much.
EDIT: Oh, and from my experiences growing up in a pretty conservative environment: lots of Americans honestly feel there's too much confusing info out there about diets, workouts, etc. It's always in the news, so you get tired of hearing about it and how you're going to die at 40 because of the terrible things you're doing to your body (McDonalds every week, or whatever). Plus, we've seen so many diet/fitness program commercials on TV and heard so many stories of them not working. I think people are well aware they should make a change, but how to do so is such a noisy topic with mixed success, that it stresses them out just thinking about it. Even if you were to provide them a new, easier way to get fit, it would look exactly the same as all those fake diets and exercise programs they saw on TV. Who knows if your new shit's gonna work or not? They'd rather not even bother.
That's what I believe. Maybe it won't be a French Revolution type reaction, but it will continue to radicalize people, as the gap widens and magnitude and time.
Why are we looking at self-reports instead of outcomes?
If self reports remained constant since 1993 for the most privileged group and dropped for other groups, then all things being equal, outcomes should have dropped on average when you look at the entire population, but when you look at data about actual outcomes, they don't support this:
Ironically something negatively affected by lead exposure, yet the comment you reply to seems to be judging people in poor area's decisions as being a factor in theit health outcomes while at the same time minimising lead poisoning's impact.
I don't blame poor people for their plight. I didn't bootstrap myself to high executive function, the universe just gave it to me. Those affected by environmental lead are no more in charge.
But we have to get to the root cause of inequality to begin talking about a solution.
Most people have poor health because they make poor decisions. So either we disallow them agency and act as their perpetual nanny, or accept the world isn't perfect and that distributions will be unequal.
Throwing money at the problem won't help. You can spend unlimited healthcare dollars for no measurable benefit.
From your writing, it sounds like from your perspective there are only two outcomes:
* Unacceptably nanny people
* Do nothing and accept inequality in life, and make no mitigations to prevent it
You have listed a lot of things that you think won't work. What do you think _will_ work, that allows people agency and doesn't require acting as their perpetual nanny?
Why would that be a better hypothesis? It seems likely that for all of these factors the arrow of causality would go in both directions.
Being wealthier allows you to spend more time, money and effort on health (though with diminishing returns). You can spend more time and effort learning
Being healthier, allows you do physically work more both short and long term. There are also cognitive benefits from healthy activities like exercise.
Being born with a high IQ and raised well, lets you potentially make better health choices and being smarter allows greater access to financially beneficial activities.
I would like to encourage people to join a local community garden program and also let others know this option might exist in their hometown. I found it to be an invaluable way to grow healthy food and meet people from all walks of life. We grow veggies in our backyard too, but the public gardens are where you actually meet nice people outside of your economic class, which is far more rewarding on a personal level to me than driving around in an expensive car to an expensive mall to buy expensive stuff.
Where are the actual income brackets? I clicked through the NPR article to the study itself and still can't find them.
I also don't understand how self-reported health can be objectively valid for a study like this.
E.g. if you believe you are healthy and never visit the doctor because you don't see a need to do so, but you have an undiscovered heart condition that causes your death a year after participating in the study.
It also seems like the headline is somewhat deceiving given that the study does not differentiate between mental and physical health. I don't assign the same weight to missing work because you are sick or injured to missing work because you feel depressed that day(I have admittedly had plenty of the latter at my old job).
From article:
"But, Ramirez-Valles says, the study does a good job of showing that when it comes to health outcomes, "it's not always [immediately] about health." He says the study's findings indicate a need for two broad policy recommendations: a revision of the minimum wage and a rethinking of our current taxation system.
"Income inequality is at the bottom of this," he says. "We need to target and attack [it] aggressively. Not only in this country, but worldwide." "
This concentration of wealth haven't happened over a night. I don't think the income difference is the only problem but also the accumulation of capital. The article seem to forget the difference between income versus spending in addition to start capital.
How is the health of people with a lot of capital and a low income and high spending? Or is it not possible to have low income with a lot of capital?
The rethinking of the taxation system, I do think Ramez has a point as income has higher taxation compared to capital. The amount of capital matters more than the amount of income.
EDIT: Apologies for the rant, went a little overboard oh well.
For the overwhelming majority of heavy hitting chronic diseases (Diabetes T2, Obesity, Heart Attacks, even likely cancer). They are completely preventable though diet and other lifestyle changes.
Good food, grass fed meat, fish and fresh vegetables aren't that expensive people could afford it if they thought it was an actual priority. For those suffering from weight problems (In the UK the obesity rate is 27%! [1] Not even the overweight) I'd recommend for them to cut down on their frequency of meals and ensure that the one or two meals they have are healthy (Very low fructose, nutrient dense, keeps insulin low e.t.c.)
It's the same with exercising, a gym membership isn't that much money cheap gyms exist. But you don't even need any money to do some simple body weight exercises, depending on what you do and your fitness level it can literally take 10 minutes.
So it's not a lack of time or money for anyone but the absolute poorest, people just don't seem to care that much. I really don't know why ?
> So it's not a lack of time or money for anyone but the absolute poorest, people just don't seem to care that much. I really don't know why ?
I would hazard a guess that neither you, nor anyone you know, is a single parent working multiple minimum-wage jobs to provide for a couple of kids living in rented space, with poor transportation available, no easy access to things like laundry facilities, living in a food desert, with no high socio-economic status people in their personal network.
In short, your privileged experience doesn't even come close to what the bottom 20%-40% of Americans live.
Personally I think they do shoulder some blame. But I certainly think things could be made significantly easier for the average person to do the right thing.
Nutrition science is very complicated with very strong biases and conflicting results. It makes it difficult to actually know what to eat, the media doesn't help by regurgitating every single crappy study that has a catchy or provocative conclusion. (The rubbish getting published and the peer review process is another can of worms)
There are many companies with a vested financial interest in selling appealing but unhealthy food. People are effected by advertising and what is easy, that isn't their fault.
Exercises for staying reasonably healthy doesn't really get taught. Things could certainly be made easier, for the average person.
> Personally I think they do shoulder some blame. But I certainly think things could be made significantly easier for the average person to do the right thing.
Here is a good example. I'm not poor. $30 on a meal means very little to me.
I'm not aware of many low calorie, healthy, quick food options, even if price isn't an issue.
I think that's the problem. You can get $0.99 cheeseburgers + fries + milkshakes quickly, but you can't get a $9.99 salad quickly. I know fast food chains sell salads but... I feel like that's a guaranteed way to not get the full nutrition of what a salad is really supposed to offer.
I don’t know the stats off the top of my head but I’ve heard many times that men’s health issues are under-studies relative to women’s — ie breast cancer versus prostate cancer. I’ve also seen that mental health problems affect men more than women, as well as behavioral problems with youth, and yet there’s no outcry for “health justice” for all the men with mental issues or men vastly overrepresented in the prison population.
The study claims that health correlates most strongly with income, and that the gap between black and white has narrowed - and yet the study author claims there’s a “stunning lack of progress.”
Most of America’s problems correlate most strongly with income and more weakly with race and gender, which isn’t surprising when income itself is uneven between race and gender demographics.
Yet it feels to me like we’re constantly crying out about race and gender discrimination while paying much less attention to wealth and income which seem to be the root issue.
Are there racists in the country? Do hate crimes happen? Yes, and we shouldn’t gloss over them.
But are the country’s problems driven mostly by racial hatred? I don’t think so. I think the problem is we have done a lot to pull the ladder up behind the upper-middle class, everyone in the lower income brackets is getting screwed, and that disproportionately affects minorities and historically disadvantaged groups. I think if we could get more serious about putting the ladder back and investing in upward mobility for all, we could make a lot more progress on all the rest of the issues that are affecting the country.